Tag Archives: mandalas

My creative frenzy has continued over the weekend, and extended out from the original mandala concept. Progress is slow because I am learning thing I did not know about Photoshop through videos, which is time consuming, although very worthwhile. Here is my rendition of Sunrise at Angkor Wat, an image I took last year, with the Before and After for reference. (Please zoom in; there is a lot of detail). Unfortunately, a lesson I have learned is to make completely sure that the images overlap, as I have two very annoying lines one pixel wide intruding into the image, which I am struggling to get rid of. I have printed out and framed a couple of the mandalas so far, and they don’t look bad at all.

Sunrise at Angkor Wat

I then started to look at moving away from a circular image towards something that still holds references to the original image. The result below is called Wolfgang Tillmans Revisited. Before and After are shown again. I rather like this, and think there is some potential here too.

Finally, I have been looking again at something I was hoping to do in assignment 3 of C&N, which is combining different images in an organised way, and have finally figured out how to make a shape within an image (and written down the instructions, so I can do it again).

My plan now is to explore this in more complex ways, as outlined in this YouTube video on polyscapes. This should allow me to manipulate my images in the way I am looking for. It isn’t a quick process, but is great fun. I am also mulling over the idea of turning some of these images into patchwork quilt works, using fabrics similar to the colourways I am producing.

Today, I’ve been making some abstracts of Iceland, and extending the Photoshop repetition idea a little further. Here are a couple of original images, and some of my variations. The first is River at Jökulsárlón, with the original first (obviously).

I then tried something a little different, using a YouTube video on making Kalaidoscopes in Photoshop. This included how to make a repeatable action set for the process, so that I don’t have to start from scratch every time.

It is interesting that in the straightforward mandala has picked out a small feature from the original (a rope hanging in the drying hut) and emphasised that, while the kaleidoscope version is much truer to the original colours and proportion.

With this in mind, I produced a kaleidoscope of the first image and this was the result.

Not nearly as successful as the other one. Clearly the layout of the original is critical to how it turns out, depending on the treatment. Some work much better than others.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, with regard to my own work and the different locations I visit round the world. There’s a section in the Landscape course, which asks “what makes a space a place?” and my very basic understanding is that human intervention and the creation of memories there turns a space into a place. However, that is not what has struck me on my globetrotting adventures. My own experience is that it is the colour palette of the landscapes that clearly identify them. For example, when I think about Icelandic landscapes, the pictures in my mind are black, yellow, red and white, while that of central Australia is ochre, black, soft lime green and yellow.

Taking this a little further, it is interesting to flick through my Lightroom library at high speed, over the course of the year. As the seasons change, so does the colour palette in a very clear but subtle way. Of course, we all know that the seasons are associated with different colours – black and white for winter; greens and yellows for spring; bright yellows, reds and blues for summer; and soft golds, bronzes and browns for autumn.

Alongside this, a couple of pieces of work have caught my attention online, which specifically look at the way that colour grading is used in films and TV programmes. Jason Shulman has condensed entire films into a single image, which condenses the colour grading used and which gives hints about it and also how the director filled the screen in their work. There has been much speculation on the OCA Facebook sites about how he achieved this, and the consensus was that he merged a series of very long exposures. In a similar vein, Visually Satisfying Project Shares the Color Palettes of Iconic Film Scenes, a Twitter project, picks out the specific colours that exemplify movies and puts them together in the same way that Design Seeds uses. This has the effect of bringing together a range of colours that work together and which are reminiscent of the films concerned.

I am keen to explore the idea of working with different colour palettes as representations of a place and have decided to explore them in a couple of different ways. Firstly, I have taken the scenery out of the images for the most part and making mandalas in Photoshop which merge the colours into complex patterns. Below are my first two trials, and I am quite excited about where this might go. They are both from Australia, the first from Uluru and the second from Darwin. Alongside it is an abstract of water reflections from Katherine Gorge in the style of Peter Kenny, a photographer whose abstract work I greatly admire. This has possibilities too. Do zoom in on the mandalas – there is a lot of detail in them

Mandala 1 – Uluru in the rain

Mandala 2 – Darwin Botanical Gardens

Abstracts 1 – Katherine Gorge, Australia

The potential in Photoshop to take this further are huge, and it merges my interests in patchwork and photography in a mutually effective way. There is much to be learned here about the use of vectors in making template shapes and extending the complexity of the work to incorporate symbols and patterns appropriate to the place about which they were made.